The blasts on Boylston Street were felt across the nation, shaking and sometimes shattering a fragile hope–formed slowly in the years since 2001–that maybe it won’t happen here.

Not again.

Then it did.

But what happened in Boston that hasn’t happened since September 11? All we really can say with confidence so far is that somebody tried to kill a large group of people; as USA Today (12/19/12) itself has reported, such mass slayings are alarmingly common in the United States, with 774 people killed in 156 incidents between 2006 and 2010. “Mass Killings Occur in USA Once Every Two Weeks,” the headline pointed out.

If one makes the assumption that the slaughter in Boston was politically motivated, and therefore meets the definition of terrorism, it’s still far from unique in post-September 11 America. The Southern Poverty Law Center has a lengthy list of right-wing terrorism incidents since the Oklahoma City bombing, more than half of which occurred since September 2001; Wikipedia has a list that’s less extensive but more ideologically diverse. Among the incidents that you would hope that reporters covering a possible terrorism incident ought to recall:

The two people shot at the El Al ticket counter at the Los Angeles Airport in July 2002.

The Beltway sniper attacks that killed 10 people in the D.C. area in October 2002.

The shootings at the Knoxville Unitarian Universalist Church that left two dead (killed by a gunman who explained that he “wanted to kill…every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book [100 People Who Are Screwing Up America]”–FAIR Blog, 3/11/10).

The crashing of a plane into the IRS office in Austin, Texas, in February 2010, killing two (including the pilot).

The Times Square bombing in May 2010.

The attempted bombing of the Martin Luther King Day parade in Spokane, Washington, in 2011.

The Sikh temple massacre in Wisconsin, which killed six in August 2012.

This is just a small sampling of the violent political incidents since September 11. It’s hard to see how you could have a hope, however fragile, that terrorism “won’t happen here”–unless you weren’t paying attention.

Scott Shane in the New York Times (4/16/13), meanwhile, didn’t seem to be paying attention to what he was writing in the same story when he wrote:

The bombing of the Boston Marathon on Monday was the end of more than a decade in which the United States was strikingly free of terrorist attacks, in part because of far more aggressive law enforcement tactics in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Both this lead and the headline, “Bombings End Decade Without Terror in U.S.,” were contradicted by the body of the piece, which quotes a terrorism expert as saying that “the post-9/11 decade saw about 40 percent fewer attacks in the United States than the decade before the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.” Sixty percent as much terrorism does not make for a “decade without terror,” obviously, nor does it make the United States “strikingly free of terrorist attacks.”

The headline and story were later re-edited to make them less inaccurate; now its “Bombings End Decade of Strikingly Few Successful Terrorism Attacks in U.S.” and “the end of more than a decade in which the United States experienced strikingly few terrorist attacks.” But it’s still not clear what Boston would be the “end” of; if terrorist “success” is measured in body counts, the anthrax letters, the beltway snipers and the Sikh temple massacre were all more “successful.”

The fact that journalists assigned to cover this story could fail to remember that political violence has been part of the United States landscape for the past decade and more is testament to a narrow definition that dismisses right-wing domestic violence as not really terrorism–and to a will to believe, for partisan or psychological reasons, that George W. Bush “kept us safe” after 9/11. The reality is not so comforting.

Extra! Magazine Editor Since 1990, Jim Naureckas has been the editor of Extra!, FAIR's monthly journal of media criticism. He is the co-author of The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error, and co-editor of The FAIR Reader: An Extra! Review of Press and Politics in the '90s. He is also the co-manager of FAIR's website. He has worked as an investigative reporter for the newspaper In These Times, where he covered the Iran-Contra scandal, and was managing editor of the Washington Report on the Hemisphere, a newsletter on Latin America. Jim was born in Libertyville, Illinois, in 1964, and graduated from Stanford University in 1985 with a bachelor's degree in political science. Since 1997 he has been married to Janine Jackson, FAIR's program director. You can follow Jim on Twitter at @JNaureckas.

“The fact that journalists assigned to cover this story could fail to remember that political violence has been part of the United States landscape for the past decade and more is testament to a narrow definition that dismisses right-wing domestic violence as not really terrorism,” writes Jim Naureckas.
I agree with Jim’s overall analysis, but the above sentence is confusing. The journalists in question cannot “fail to remember” something they simply don’t know.
And as the second part of the sentence states, it’s the frame of reference, and indeed the very definition of “terrorism” being used that is to blame here.
In fact the word “terrorism” as used in the media is completely ideological, and can more or less be defined as “violence committed, or presumed to have been committed, by people or organisations we don’t like.”

Amerika is in denial of its own murderous & terrorist gov.
USA is *war & terror ag/people of the world. This nation kills, tortures, imprisons at will to show superiority & to subjugate; some of us resist the macabre onslaught ag/humanity by fbi/cia/dod etc., yet all who live in denial of the threat to human life posed by the assassins of usa are most vulnerable because they trust this God forsaken gov beyond all reason, and because they benefit from the carnage perpetrated in their name.

EXCEPT THAT THE VENEZUELAN ELECTION TURNED OUT TO BE CLOSE. I WISH FAIR WOULD BE MORE DISPASSIONATE. THERE IS CRIME THERE, PERHAPS NOT AS BAD AS HONDURAS. IS IT ALL OUR FAULT? WE SHOULD LEGALIZE DRUGS AND STOP SENDING GUNS. AND STOP TELLING OTHER COUNTRIES HOW TO RUN THEIR ELECTIONS. I GET ANNOYED WHEN FOREIGN PUBLICATIONS ENDORSE A CANDIDATE, BUT SO DO OURS. TOO BAD WE DIDN’T HAVE JIMMY CARTER TO RULE ON BUSH V GORE, OR GORE HAD STOOD UP FOR HIMSELF MORE. I JUST DON’T RABID ABOUT CHAVEZ ONE WAY OR ANOTHER. SEE AS MANY SIDES AS I CAN GET. I SUGGEST, FOR EXAMPLE, REPORTERS WITHOUT BORDERS. AS A MEASURE OF HOW REPRESSIVE WE AND OTHER COUNTRIES ARE. HARD TO BELIEVER CANADA IS THAT LILY WHITE, BUT IF IT IS, SO BE IT.

There has been terrorism since the dawn of civilization and there always will be, regardless of how draconian the police state becomes. All this does is give excuses to lawmakers to further enrich their surveillance state buddies. The passage of CISPA note in point!

[…] on 60 Minutes (4/21/13). “TERROR RETURNS” was the banner headline of USA Today (Fair Blog, 4/16/13) the day after the bombings, with another front-page headline that read, “That Post-9/11 Quiet? […]